All sober-minded South Africans must reject the ANC’s cynical manipulation of electoral rules and processes aimed at entrenching the ANC’s perpetual misrule.

The ethically compromised President Cyril Ramaphosa is expected to address the ‘National Dialogue on Coalition Governments’, which will be held in Cape Town on the 4th and 5th August 2023. The two day dialogue is convened by the Leader of Government Business, Deputy President Mashatile, and is themed: 'Working together to build strong and resilient democratic institutions to serve the people’.

This co-mingling of state and political party affairs has not evoked serious objection from the obsequious parties invited by Mashatile. Despite his abuse of parliamentary majority to cover-up the Phala Phala crimes, Ramaphosa will be accorded a platform to talk about building “strong and resilient democratic institutions to serve the people”, apparently without a whimper of protest from the political parties present.

It is a frightening reality that the ANC desperately seeks to sell its strategy of “Cyril Ramaphosa über alles”, where all of the corruption, maladministration, unconstitutional and criminal acts by the Ramaphosa-led government will be sanitised and white-washed under the guise of strengthening institutions of government. Purportedly, the dialogue “aims to lay a foundation for a National Framework on Coalition Governments, which will serve as a guide for effectively managing and navigating coalition governments where they become necessary”. Besides this being hypothetical there is another sinister agenda at play here.

The so-called dialogue is phony and self-serving as it does not include all political parties registered to contest the elections in 2024. Implicit in this strategy of exclusion is the real possibility of buying over and enticing political parties currently represented in parliament through co-option and promises of cabinet positions. This strategy not only misperceives the nature and role of political parties under Section 19 of the Constitution, but is premised on the false assumption that all political parties currently represented in parliament will emerge from the 2024 elections unscathed and still commanding electoral support from the voters. That is a gross miscalculation, and has no basis in fact!

In our system of democracy political parties occupy the centre stage and play a vital part in facilitating the exercise of political rights. This fact is affirmed by Section 1 of the Constitution which proclaims that, “universal adult suffrage, a national common voters roll, regular elections and a multi-party system of democratic government, to ensure accountability, responsiveness and openness”, are some of the values on which our state is founded. In the main, elections are contested by political parties.

It is these parties which determine lists of candidates who get elected to legislative bodies. Even the number of seats in the National Assembly and provincial legislatures are determined, “by taking into account available scientifically based data and representations by interested parties”. It cannot be gainsaid that success for political parties in elections lies in the policies they adopt and put forward as a plan for addressing challenges and problems facing communities.

Limiting a national “dialogue” only to the few parties currently represented in parliament, instead of extending the invitation to parties registered with the IEC to contest the 2024 elections exposes the ANC agenda of manipulation and it is certainly not a genuine national dialogue.

Furthermore, the ANC supported by the racist Democratic Alliance (DA) has been promoting the fallacious notion of singling out Ramaphosa as the Messiah that “rescued” his party, or that ran roughshod over his political party to single-handedly secure ANC electoral victory in 2019. This is a propaganda narrative that was shamelessly endorsed by Chief Justice Zondo in his State Capture report.

Our democracy is founded on a multi-party system of government. Unlike the past electoral system that was based on geographic voting constituencies, the present electoral system for electing members of the National Assembly, and of the provincial legislatures, must “result, in general, in proportional representation”.

This means a person who intends to vote in national or provincial elections must vote for a political party registered for the purpose of contesting the elections and not for a candidate. It is the registered party that nominates candidates for the election on regional and national party lists. The Constitution itself obliges every citizen to exercise the franchise through a political party. A dialogue on coalition government that ignores this reality is simply a non- starter and doomed to fail.

Having said that, the political parties as vehicles for voter participation must also be astute to avoid some, or all, of the following tendencies that could have an adverse determinative outcome on the 2024 elections. By the standards we are accustomed to, the 2019 elections outcomes were a recipe for disaster - the 65% turnout was bad and reflects that political parties appear to have left the matters of voter registration exclusively to the IEC.

There was no concerted visible party-driven effort to get people to register in large numbers, or to get those registered to the polling stations on election day. It is projected that the same trend will continue in 2024 and the main beneficiaries of such low voter turnout would be the ANC and the racist DA whose white supporters always vote in large numbers.

Ten million voted for the ANC in the 2019 elections, but there were 10 million eligible voters who never bothered to register in the first place. In addition, there was another 10 million who registered to vote, but actually never did. This means there were 20 million votes that simply stayed away from the voting. From this vantage point the 57% proportional majority of the ANC, and a very low voter turn-out in traditional ANC support areas, which was a manifestation of voter anger with ANC corruption, and poor service delivery, will be substantially exacerbated as corruption in Ramaphosa’s scandal-ridden administration have gotten worse.

When one takes into account that in 2019 less that 20% of eligible first-time voters, that is young people, actually registered to vote the challenge for currently registered political parties is to devise a strategy to attract this important potential voters group to register and vote. Collectively bargaining with the old wood of the ANC is a total waste of precious time.

We must eschew a naïve ANC-driven narrative that seeks to distort history and tell lies about the recent elections.

Some have argued that it was under Zuma that the ANC’s electoral decline unfolded: from 2004 when the governing party under Thabo Mbeki scored well into a two-thirds majority at 69.69%, the ANC in the 2009 elections headlined by Zuma obtained 65,9% support, which dropped to 62% in the 2014 elections. But that naïve narrative focussed on demonising an ANC leader does not take into account other political developments which had a detrimental effect on the electoral fortunes of the ANC during that period.

First was the emergence of COPE which broke away from the ANC, and which contested the 2009 elections. Arguably, the votes COPE received were siphoned off from the ANC as the majority of COPE members were former ANC members. Further, developments within COSATU, an important Alliance partner also had an impact on ANC subsequent performance in the 2014 elections and the municipal elections.

NUMSA broke away from COSATU and ceased its support and cooperation with the ANC. That also meant a sizeable percentage of the ANC traditional support base was eroded. Compounding the shedding of ANC members further was the emergence of the EFF, which broke away from the ANC. The EFF also contested the 2014 and 2019 elections and obtained decent results, and increasingly gained seats in the national and provincial legislatures. That trend is likely to continue.

It is true that COSATU which had developed an antipathy towards President Zuma in the latter years had enthusiastically embraced Cyril Ramaphosa as new ANC President. But that did not result in actual assistance to the ANC to ensure voter registration and transporting registered voters to the polling stations for instance. But it is the worst political spin to interpret the 2019 election ANC national result of 57% as reflective of the impact of goodwill for Cyril Ramaphosa as both president of party and government.

One must also analyse the impact of the recently concluded State Capture inquiries on the expected level of support the ANC can count on. The ANC was on trial for corruption and maladministration before Zondo’s kangaroo court and it stands convicted as such. Another factor worthy of consideration is the passing of transparency legislation requiring both donors and parties to disclose donations to see whether it would have a chilling effect on the flow of cash to the political parties. If it did, then the ability to register voters and assist them with transport during the voting would be hampered significantly. Political parties will have to be innovative and cannot simply rely on activating party cells in their traditional support base to have everything done.

Another myth to be discarded is the notion that President Cyril Ramaphosa can bring traditional ANC voters back into the fold, and thereby give himself more political room for manoeuvre, to drive his discredited reform agenda more decisively in government. The so-called anti-corruption crusade and reform agenda of Ramaphosa starts and end with one word - Phala Phala!

The myth of Ramaphosa as a revolutionary destined to invigorate the ANC was a cruel joke as it ignores the phenomenal growth of the EFF which has been taking away members from the ANC for a decade now. It also ignores the fact that even smaller parties like the ATM attracted lots of ANC members and made some surprising gains in the 2019 elections. If that trend continues, with the additional factor that ARETA will also be contesting the 2024 elections, then the notion of return to the old glory days of the ANC would remain just a pipe dream.

Truth be told, astute political party leaders would not settle for platitudes or be content with having futile “dialogue” with the moribund ANC – there are over 25 million potential voters who must be registered and assisted to get to the voting stations on election day and there are millions more ANC voters who are disillusioned with the party and the ANC knows that very well.

The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) is going to be part of this farcical, and biased, “National Dialogue on Coalition Governments”, in doing so the ANC government deliberately perpetuates the myth that the IEC is a truly independent and objective referee. It is not! It is utter folly not to first and foremost consider the make-up and functioning of the IEC. The issue of transparency of service providers that the IEC uses is of paramount importance. The current reality is that front companies of the ruling ANC play a central role in the functioning of the IEC, and thus in the whole electoral process.